This chapter considers the English of the Southern United States with a focus on the ways in which past and present settlement histories, social structures and economic realities are reflected in the language and language variation of the region.  Despite persisting ideas of geographic and social insularity, the American South is a large region that has and has always contained great diversity. This chapter begins with identifying where is the American South, what are its subregions and what role regionality plays in variation. Further, we outline what are some of the traditional linguistic features that are associated with the South. A discussion of research into variation and how different social factors and groups follows. We conclude by looking forward to needed research.

This chapter deals with the Harmel report and the involvement during 1967 of Britain and Germany in the reappraisal of NATO and its future tasks, proposed by Pierre Harmel, the Belgian Foreign Minister. That such a reappraisal was both necessary and urgent was evident after the French withdrawal from the military organization of NATO and in the light of questioning by public opinion in NATO countries of the utility of the organisation. For Germany, the exercise was regarded as an important opportunity to reinforce its own Ostpolitik and to ensure that the German problem was deemed by members of the Alliance as an essential ingredient of a settlement in Europe. An important consideration, in terms of Anglo-German relations, was that Britain and Germany co-operated closely as co-rapporteurs for one of the Harmel study working groups.

Though coverage denials and delays impose on physicians and patients (especially marginalized patients) substantial administrative burden, the persistence of this practice is inevitable. Drawing on interviews with patients and former health insurance executives, this chapter reflects on harms caused by prior authorization and offers a menu of state and federal solutions to expand access to care, while also reflecting on how the 2024 election results impact their likelihood. A growing complication is major insurers’ increasing reliance on AI tools to process prior authorizations and claims in seconds. Though many states have sought to lessen prior authorization burden in targeted ways, this reach is limited because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act preempts state policies that “relate to” much of employer-sponsored health insurance. Despite some appetite for reform in Congress, legislative efforts have stalled. The 2024 election results signal a likely acceleration of America’s reliance on privatization (especially Medicare Advantage), so it is especially important to understand the impact of these managed care practices and ways to mitigate their burdens.

The following chapter describes the varieties of English found in Canada’s eastern Maritime Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), which arose from a unique mix of American Loyalist, British, Scottish, Irish, French and German settlers. These varieties have been traditionally stigmatised for their divergence from inland Canadian norms, though this is changing as younger speakers in the region conform to more prestige varieties further west. Conversely, some traditional speech features, like the use of ingressive pulmonic articulation with the discourse particle yeah↓, are being recycled by those same young people to signal both local solidarity and resistance to hegemonic discourses surrounding vernacularity. This chapter draws on original research, linguistic descriptions of the region and its English varieties, as well as comedic performances/metalinguistic commentary in both popular and social media.

This chapter investigates the notions of local political leadership and asks what is meant by this concept in England and how it applies to elected mayors, council leaders and councillors. The most powerful context in which English mayors find themselves is the domination of local politics by political parties. The separation of powers, the mayoral political focus and the mayoral dichotomy bring together a range of issues which help uncover the richness of the English experiment with elected mayors. The separation of powers within English mayoral councils has the elected mayor as the head of the executive and political head of the council. The party-detached mayor deliberately places some distance between himself or herself and the party group of councillors. The ward/division and the authority of English local government have elected representatives to ‘lead’ within their own areas.

This chapter serves as an account of what missile defence is. It shows how the missile defence system is located within the overall US thinking of security and observes that missile defence has certain assumptions on the evolving perceptions of threat to US security. The chapter explains how a missile defence system aimed at new threats violates the principles of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Next, it clarifies what exactly the new threats entail – as stated in the Bottom-Up Review and the ‘rogue states doctrine’ – before considering the idea of deploying a missile defence shield. The last part of the chapter outlines the development of the defence mechanism from 1944 to 2003.

Once confined to the margins of discussion about linguistic variation and change in the history of American English, recent years have seen an explosion of work on language contact. We review and synthesise recent work and present original evidence on how contact has shaped many facets of American English across many regions, reaching from the lexicon and phonology through syntax and pragmatics. We draw especially on features less widely discussed until now and look at how these enrich our broader understanding of contact in American English. We pay special attention to the challenges of identifying features that do and do not come from language contact and begin to trace the paths by which features have found their way into American speech and writing. Ultimately, we argue that, in some sense, many distinct forms of American English have been and are being shaped by contact.

Most sociolinguistic research in American cities has focused on particular speech communities or communities of practice within cities. But cities are sites of contact between speech communities, and a sociolinguistic description of a city qua city would have to examine the results of such contact. Drawing on research conducted in Pittsburgh, PA, this chapter considers the sociolinguistic outcomes of urban encounters: immigrants’ language contact and the founder effect, the varied effects of African Americans’ contact with the speech of white people, the language ideological effects of mobility with respect to a city, and the role of visual artefacts in the circulation of linguistic features and language ideology across speech communities.

Identifiability is a feature of the organisation of political institutions which ensures that the following question can always be answered in the operation of a system of governance: who was responsible? This is an important political question—especially when things go wrong. If it cannot be answered, accountability is rendered impossible. It is therefore important to explore how we go about answering the identifiability question. This chapter presents two accounts of how one is to answer: the ‘causal’ and ‘institutional’ accounts. It argues that the causal account runs into trouble when confronted with the problem of ‘many hands’. The institutional account is more helpful despite the fact that it runs up against the problem of ‘personification’.

This chapter draws attention to Leigh's 1977 play—and its TV adaptation—Abigail's Party. Abigail's Party was just one of the nine feature-length productions which Leigh devised and directed between 1973 and 1985. The success of these plays meant that most British viewers were made aware of Leigh's work, long before the arrival of High Hopes in 1988, even though few of them would have had the chance to see Bleak Moments during its limited London run. Leigh recalls of those heady days of British television drama that one could get eight or nine million viewers in one evening. When Leigh describes his TV years as “a long time in the womb,” the comment is double-edged; he acknowledges that he was protected by the BBC as well as waiting to be fully born as a filmmaker. Public awareness and appreciation of Leigh's work were high by the mid-1980s, then, but his ambition was still to make another feature film for the cinema.

This chapter takes as its point of departure the condition of the subject under power, exploring the problem of self-domination or self-subjection: the way that the subject, rather than simply being coerced or repressed, often willingly conforms to the very identities and subject ‘positions’ that have been constructed for him. This creates certain problems for radical politics, however: there is no longer a universal human subject to be emancipated or a completely autonomous conception of human agency. The chapter explores a number of different responses to this crisis of the ‘death of Man’: Michel Foucault's strategies of self-mastery and autonomy through the ethic of ‘care’; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's attack on Oedipal subjectivity, and their Nietzschean dispersal of the very category of subject into a multitude of forces, potentialities and moments of flux. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the chapter tries to develop a new understanding of political subjectification — one that involves at the same time a rupturing of existing identities and subject positions.

The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act enabled but did not compel industrial towns in Britain to establish municipal corporations, let alone to develop the publicly owned infrastructure. The status and influence of the great industrial towns were signalled by the magnificence of the town halls built as clubs for the industrial and commercial elites who comprised the majority of councillors and aldermen. The development of complex bureaucratic municipal government began at a faltering pace, motivated in some cities by locally sponsored political initiatives, but in others by a belated response to central government demands. The pace of change, however, accelerated from the 1870s, with substantial municipal purchase of infra-structure and energy companies, stimulated in part by the backward city of Birmingham catching up with developments elsewhere. This chapter focuses on the golden age of municipal government in Britain, incorporation and improvement of towns, consolidation of the boroughs, municipalisation of utilities, the government of London, professionalism and bureaucracy, the franchise, party politics, local elites, and civic pride and commercial interest.